Valerie Strauss investigated the strange case of the charter school that was approved to open in rural Alabama, over the objections of the local mayor and despite the rejection of its proposal by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. The deed for the building is held by a Utah holding company. The principal is described as “Amy O,” with no last name. The school will be operated by a charter chain based in Sugarland, Texas, whose CEO was co-founder and CEO of the Harmony charter chain. Harmony is widely believed to be a Gulen school, but like all Gulen schools, it claims not to be affiliated with Imam Fethullah Gulen. As a general rule of thumb, schools that have Turkish leaders and a significant number of Turkish teachers working on Hb1 visas are almost certainly Gulen schools.
A charter school in a rural county of 17,000 people in Alabama, built and owned by a Utah holding company, operated by a Turkish CEO from Sugarland, Texas. The locals are scratching their heads. So am I.
This bears watching.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This bear’s watching!
lol
As long as the free market fools peddle privatization, we will see opportunists line up to exploit vulnerable areas. Rural Alabama does not need a Turkish school to set up shop and compete with public schools for scant resources. Locals should demand that state lawmakers support legitimate Alabama state public schools operated by professionals, not foreign amateurs.
OMG … another Gulen Charter School. I wonder how much $$$$$ Gulen is making?
Since Gulen is a religious organization DOES Gulen NOT PAY TAXES, too? I am not a tax accountant so I am unsure. What I did find was this information and it is dated 2/2/2016.
Click to access Tax-Exempt-Church-Schools-FAQs.pdf
I keep wondering WHAT HOLD GULEN has re: American politicians.
I also can’t help but notice the names selected for charter schools. Those names of charter schools are just more propaganda. There’s nothing “harmonious” about the Harmony charter chain.
Have American’s gone DAFT?
Do READ Diane’s most recent book: THE WISDOM AND WIT OF DIANE RAVITCH (Garn Press, 2019).
I am still at the beginning of this book. I love each chapter I have read thus far, esp. these:
“First, Let’s Fire All the Teachers! (posted May 2, 2010) when Duncan and Obama clapped at the closing of Central Falls High School in RI.
“Obama’s Race to the Top Will Not Improve Education” (Huffington Post, August 1, 2010).
“The Myth of Charter Schools” (The New York Review of Books, November 11, 20100. BTW, I wept. I saw this on TV and was horrified.
Back to reading this book, then off to take my dogs to the VET’s today.
Thanks for writing this book, Diane, and thanks to Garn Press for publishing it.
Thank you, Yvonne.
This sounds like it has all the signs of a terminal cancer/disease designed to destroy the local democratically led public schools and/or to be used as a front to launder money. Donald Trump and his genetically designed disease called Besty the Brainless are sure to be all in for any method of laundering money … as long as they get their share.
“That means that ACD has relinquished its ownership of the Woodland Prep school to a holding company that ACD owns, and now ACD will charge itself rent and interest — paid for by the tax dollars that were once flowing into Washington County schools.
And make no mistake, ACD is rolling in the cash — receiving 6 percent of the “total development costs” in monthly lease payments, according to the heavily redacted contract it signed with Woodland Prep’s board. That fee does not include a guaranteed 8.9 percent capitalization rate that ACD is guaranteed.”
That’s why we call it corporate ed reform.
As the companies get more and more sophisticated and larger and larger we’ll see a lot more of these deals. It will be impossible for an ordinary person in the public to know who owns the school or where they money goes.
Valerie Strauss has the resources of the Washington Post and the (paid) time to conduct these investigations- people in these communities will not.
When this charter goes belly up (and it will- a county with 17,000 people can’t support a third public school with 650 students) the total investment by the county and the state will be gone. They will have flushed it down the toilet. They will have nothing to show for it, and the charter management company will take their accrued fees and rents and move to the next state.
It is all part of the great privatization scam, and the government incentivizes it. The corporation will own all the materials and furniture paid for by public dollars at the end of the fiasco. Then, these carpetbaggers will set up shop in some other unsuspecting community.
Voice of reality and truth spoken by a retired teacher! thank you for your continued support for Public Education
Yes. A scam. A raid on the public treasury.
check this out http://www.woodlandprep.blogspot.com Bama ain’t going down without a fight.
Do they thousands of people who are employed full time in lobbying for charters, studying charters, and issuing press releases promoting charters “count” the schools operated by for-profit management companies when they could for-profit charter schools?
In other words, can I set my charter chain up as a “non profit” under the tax code and then outsource the whole thing to a for-profit, and still claim I’m a nonprofit?
Because if I can they are ripping off this community twice- they are NOT paying taxes while operating a for-profit entity and bleeding the public schools dry.
It’s a double whammy to public schools students.
On 5-3-2019, Valerie Strauss wrote about Pitbull’s Slam Academy and for-profit Academica.
There’s little difference between for-profit and non-profit. They both make lots of money off public dollars. With little oversight and accountability, we have created a system of public subsidized grifters.
Chiara I have questions along those lines as well. I know from reading here & elsewhere that it is quite common for a non-profit org to obtain charter authorization, then sub out school operations to a for-profit charter-mgt co.
But is that charter called a “non-profit’ by media or stat-counting orgs?
If not, what does a “true” non-profit charter look like? Does the “corporate veil” over fin details still obtain (thus we’ll never know)?
My understanding of non-profit is that excess revenue is plowed back into the organization to further its mission, as opposed to paying shareholders. But if “furthering its mission” includes paying giant salaries & perks to CEO & admins up & down the line, we might as well call that crowd “shareholders.”
The entire ed reform echo chamber promoted the “skills gap”. All of them. Their work is chock a block with references to it and they used it as a justification for everything from gutting public school funding to designing CTE programs.
Are all of them going to print a retraction and admit they fell for a bunch of nonsense?
Public schools need to stop taking advice from this “movement”. They produce lousy work.
“Five or six years ago, everyone from the US Chamber of Commerce to the Obama White House was talking about a “skills gap.”
The theory here was that high unemployment reflected a structural shift in the labor market such that jobs were available, but workers simply didn’t have the right education or training for them. Harvard Business Review ran articles about this — including articles rebutting people who said the “skills gap” didn’t exist — and big companies like Siemens ran paid sponsor content in the Atlantic explaining how to fix the skills gap.
But nothing was really done to transform the American education system, and no enormous investment was made in retraining unemployed workers. And yet the unemployment rate kept steadily falling in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 as continued low interest rates from the Federal Reserve let a demand-side recovery continue. Donald Trump became president, injected a bunch of new fiscal stimulus on both the spending and tax sides, and in 2017 and 2018 the unemployment rate kept falling and the labor force participation rate kept rising.”
Betsy DeVos recited the “skills gap” yesterday to justify her crusade to pull funding from public school students and redirect it to private schools. The skills gap has been debunked.
Why is the US Department of Education promoting nonsense, and since they are promoting nonsense, should any public school in the country listen to them on anything else?
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance
Great link. When there are lots of job-seekers, employers get choosier by raising entry-level credentials; “when the labor market is healthy [tighter] employers have incentives to try to impart skills to workers rather than posting advertorial content about how the government should fix this problem for them.” Ain’t it da truth.
I saw that principle at work w/ my music-tech sons: it’s a glamor industry, everybody wants in, so many “college internships” pay nothing for being a gopher in a rathole studio & training yourself from a manual when you have a minute—or worse, exploit skilled kids, having them do real work but no pay & no job forthcoming. As opposed to internships in my husband’s engrg co which desperately needed people so they trained college kids on the job – maybe even for some pay – summers or part-time during school yr, hoping the kids would accept a job at grad, so their time investment would pay off.
How embarrassing is that our elites (including the Harvard Business school) promoted this nonsense about a “skills gap” thereby blaming working people for the fact that their wages weren’t going up.
Will the Harvard Business school apologize to the millions of people they misled? Will Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos apologize? Or is the plan once again that no one admits a mistake and we continue to pretend these people know what they’re talking about?
Why is their work such low quality? They have a zillion dollar endowment and ridiculously high tuition. Why do they keep churning out nonsense that harms poor and low income people?
“Why is their work such low quality?”
-Because the health of their endowment depends on keeping the billionaires happy. This is the real-life version of the The Emperor Has No Clothes.
If Harvard were receiving no Federal money, the endless stream of crap that certain departments (econ, business, education, government) produce — and that is used to make government policy would be bad enough .
But because Harvard is (supposedly) a non profit, it pays ZERO taxes on money earned every year on its $40 billion endowment and real estate holdings.
It has been reported that the money they save on taxes alone amounts to $60,000 for every student at Harvard.
In addition to this, despite being a private university, Harvard gets about $600 million each year in grants from the Federal government, which anounts to another $26,000 per student.
So, despite being a private institution with an endowment of $40 billion, Harvard gets the equivalent of roughly $86,000 per year for each and every student from the US taxpayers.
Despite this, Harvard has a very inequitable admissions policy, having essentially two pools, one for the public and other secret one for the children of donors and Harvard grads.
While some would argue that Harvard “deserves” the nearly $2 billion in Federal money it receives each year because it is a “top notch” school, the “top notch” claim is only true about certain departments.
It’s also hard to justify giving so much Federal money to a private school with such a large endowment when there are so many public institutions that serve ordinary families and our society at large that need the money so much worse.
Enlightening post, SDP, thank you. Econ, biz, ed, govt… hm, the usual soft-science suspects. In exchange for fed grants– perhaps churning out studies our big govt-spenders/ lobbyists/ thinktanks/ campaign-coffer-stuffers want to hear?
Gates-funded Pahara Institute page-
“Dr. Soner Tarim, CEO of Harmony …32,000 students…Broad Prize nominee.”
The definition for a Broad Prize nominee is someone that sold their soul to a want-to-be devil called Eli Broad.
posted at OEN https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Valerie-Strauss-on-the-Str-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Diane-Ravitch_School-Reform-190505-407.html#comment733010
with this comment… each of them (from Posts at Diane’s blog) have links at OEN to the original. It never ends — the grand theft of taxpayer money given to fraudulent charter schools, as local control is eroded.
This new USA Today/Arizona Republic/Center for Public Integrity in-depth investigation is a bombshell report on the thousands of “copy-and-paste bills” introduced and passed in state legislatures which purport to represent local interests but instead further a corporate or industry agenda.
But one state stands out as the absolute worst: Florida.
If you hate public schools, Florida is for you.
If you hate teachers, go to Florida.
To get the full flavor of why Florida is an abomination, open the link and read the post.
And, look at how Oklahoma: For-Profit Online Charter Chain Gobbles Up Rural Districts. Many districts have switched to a four-day week to save money.Some rural districts, facing insolvency, are turning their schools over to Epic, a for-profit online charter chain, which can balance the books by putting kids online and cutting teachers’ jobs.
and in case you still don’t see the pattern Rhode Island: Governor Raimondo Takes First Steps Towards State Takeover of Providence Schools
Michigan: Virtual Schools Grow Despite High Failure RateThe virtual charter industry is booming in Michigan, despite its abysmal performance. Michigan, DeVos’s home state, has outsourced its education system as much as possible to for-profit entrepreneurs. Michigan is the only state where 80% of charters are operated by for-profit corporations. This even though: National Education Policy Center: Virtual Charter Schools are a Sham and Waste Taxpayers’ Dollars
Nevada: Republicans Promise to Create More Charter Schools and Vouchers if They Win State Races
California: Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Charter Sector
Leonie Haimson: Watch Out, Oakland, the Gates Foundation is Coming for Your Public Schools!
Here’s the corporate privatization of New Jersey’s public schools:New Jersey Expose, Part 4: Cashing in on Real Estate Deals in the Charter Market | Diane Ravitch’s blog
Bob Braun: The Political Machine That Is Taking Over Newark’s School Board
Waltons Fund “National Parents Union” to Advocate for PrivatizationMaurice Cunningham, a dogged investigator of Dark Money, has discovered a shell operation funded by the multibillionaire Walton family.
West Virginia: Republicans Pull a Fast One, Introduce Bill to Lower Standards for Teachers, Eliminate State Education Department
and DON’T MISS THIS INTERVIEW: and don’t miss “Busted Pencils” Interviews the Great Carol Burris About Privatization Tim Slekar of the podcast “Busted Pencils” interviews Carol Burris about privatization and the future of public education in the Trump-DeVos era.
Here’s some photographs of the lavish charter facilities the public paid for, but do not own:
http://amercd.com/schools/#arizona
Every cent was public funding. The public doesn’t own any of it.
We are building schools with our money, and then giving them to this private company so they can skim 15% off the top of every student dollar- they’ll have a revenue stream for decades.
The public gets nothing out of the deal except a charter school no one in the community wants, and weaker public schools. They don’t even pay you interest on the loan you gave them.
Ed reformers made an absolutely lousy deal for the public. It is the worst investment imaginable. The only people who benefit are the people who work for the charter company.
Foundations funded by men like Bill Gates created the opportunity for average citizens to be fleeced.
The barbarians, after they rigged the economy for concentrated wealth, crafted a plan to rob citizens of community assets.
If the folks making all this happen were greedy billionaires, we’d have no recourse, & I don’t believe that. There will always be greedy individuals, that’s a given. And corporations will be as greedy for their shareholders as the law allows. The job of govt is to control by law how the money flows, directing it as needed to public goods. What spawns billionaires & their villainthropic foundations & laxly-regulated corporations– inviting them to buy policy—are the laws of this country, written by our elected representatives.
Are you sure all of the laws of this country are written by our elected representatives?
How many of the laws that we have today exist because of the Koch brothers and their ALEC?
“ALEC’s Influence over Lawmaking in State Legislatures
View at Medium.com
ALEC writes hundreds of “model” laws. It’s members introduce them in their state legislature, never admitting that they were written by ALEC.
I don’t know why that isn’t wrong. It should be illegal for any private sector organization like ALEC to write legislation and then use the shills they helped get elected to introduce it like it wasn’t written by ALEC.
Read Gordon Lafer’s superb book, The One Percent Solution. He explains how the Koch brothers and other right wing oligarchs use ALEC to grab control of one state at a time.
Also go to the website, ALEC Exposed to see its model legislation.
I’m talking about tax and banking and brokerage and campaign laws that make it possible to be a multibillionaire—or a bank/ corp too- big-to-fail– and the laws allowing them to buy even more favorable legislation & candidates & judges with ever-growing resources. To offshore profits and jobs, import cheap techies, form monopolies, form PACs, privatize public services, give unlimited amounts to candidates and political causes w/both dark & barely-transparent money etc. Laws can be changed. Must be changed.
So we have Chinese investors buying a charter and a Turkish imam running a chain. Heck, I’m wondering when the Russian oligarch’s will get in on the action!
Consider the big picture. With the endorsement of the federal Department of Education and both parties in Congress, communities are outsourcing their schools—or being forced to—to national corporate chains and even foreign entities like Gulen.
It would seem obvious that teaching about democracy and citizenship would not be high on their list.
Maybe the Russians are already getting in the act. They might own KIPP or one of the other corporate charter chains but it isn’t easy to find out because they are using shell companies to hide the link. Maybe the Russians invested money in corporate charters as a way to launder that cash.
cx: oligarchs
My long comment disappeared (because I stupidly left the page), but you’re all spared from having to read it, & I’ll simply say,
“Give ’em hell, Harold!!!”
Birmingham’s mayor opposes charter schools- the privatizers went rural.
“The principal is described as “Amy O,” with no last name”
That pretty much sums up not just Gulen schools but all the large charter chains.
“The Shadow Knows”
The Shadow knows ’bout Amy O’s
Turkish cults in Turkish clothes
The Shadow knows ’bout Gulen schools
Gulen books and Gulen rules
The Shadow knows ’bout Gulen money
Gulen milk and Gulen honey
We don’t know, but The Shadow knows
‘Bout exiled Turks in the Poconos